University of Virginia Library

'integrated' rush

by a cavalier daily staff writer

photo by mike russell

"An upperclassman told us that rush
was the way to find out what this place
was really like. I found out; I'm not going
back." The name of the rushee is Jerry
Scott. He is a black student, one of seven
interviewed by The Cavalier Daily about
rush and the black first-year man. When
he said he wasn't going back the others
nodded their heads in agreement.

The houses the black men rushed
ranged from blatantly racist, through
stiff-upper lip tolerant, all the way to one
house, AEPi, where every one of the
black rushees felt comfortable enough to
almost forget his position and his race.

Rush began with the dorm visits. Each
black student got an average of two or
three invitations to rush, somewhat below
the average for a white first-year man and
far below the average, for example, of a
white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant first-year
man who attended an elite New England
prep school.

But it wasn't the number of
invitations that irritated the first-year
men. It was the way the invitations were
delivered. In several cases, dumbfounded
fraternity men would wordlessly proffer
the invitation from the hall when the
unexpected black face appeared in
response to their knock on the door. In
almost all cases, conversation was
strained. One black student, however,
collected 16 invitations; the were for his
white ex-roommate, whose parents had
successfully asked that he be moved when
they saw the University's selection for
their son's roommate.

Actual rush, in many instances, was
worse. First there was often the problem
of getting in the door. "The guards would
be letting everyone in 'til they saw us
coming. Then they'd start checking
everyone's ID so that it wouldn't look
like they were just asking us," said Byron
Harris. "The guard at Pi Kap, who later
apologized, went so far as to grab me
from behind and make me show my ID
card," recalled Jerry Scott.

And it wasn't always security guards
who gave the black students trouble. At
SAE, one member saw Luther Sherman
coming up the walk with some other
black students, stepped into the doorway,
and "jabbed me in the stomach. Then he
set his arm across the doorway and told
me to 'walk around it'. Finally someone
told him to let us in but he kept
following us around; never said a word,